Quote - ...and if DAZ woke up one morning and decided, hey, let's stop allowing downloads of gen4 figures to all but past purchasers w/ it specifically in their order history?

I guarantee you that any further growth in Poser would stop almost dead cold, right then and there (Pirate Bay pending, natch). Smith Micro knows it, and even though you won't admit it, upon thinking it through, you know it too.

This is true.

But is it likely to happen? Is it even likely to happen any time soon?

As long as Gen 4 make up half of Daz's catalog, it seems very unlikely to me indeed.

We might worry, if we think it's likely that Daz will suddenly decide it prefers predatory business practices over concern for its own reputation.  The backlash from thousands and thousands of vendors, whose back catalogs absolutely depend on the availability of these items, would be immense, nevermind the response from customers.  I find it hard to imagine Daz actually doing this until Gen 4 items everywhere else begin to disappear from the marketplace naturally -- and that's going to take quite a bit of time.

---

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.